Trackers Missions

Skeleton Creek has been nominated for not just one state book award, but two. Both the Delaware Diamonds Booklist and the Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards include Skeleton Creek this year. These statewide awards are chosen by readers, so if you happen to be in either Delaware or Pennsylvania and you want to vote for Skeleton Creek or just find out more, please visit the websites listed below.

www.doe.k12.de.us/dsra/deldiamonds.htm
www.psla.org/index.php/grants-a-awards/pa-young-readers-choice-awards/38-information-for-participation

Keep on rockin’ the summer – and head over to www.trackersbook.com, where I’m helping thousands of readers become Trackers! Ben

Get ready for the Trackers Missions, set to launch on Monday, June 28th. You’ll train with the best in order to fine-tune your digital tracking skills so you too can become a genuine TRACKER. To join the fun, check out the TRACKERS site by visiting www.trackersbook.com.

If you haven’t already, make sure to enter the Justine Magazine essay contest for your chance to win a trip to Comic Con to meet Patrick Carman himself! All you have to do is write about what you would do if you were indestructible. What else are you going to do with all your free time anyways? It’s summer vacation! So get to writing, and maybe you could be the one to win a trip to San Diego! Find out more info here.

PC: I’m just going to come right out and say it at the top: Transmedia, as a unifying term, is beyond lame. And it points to a challenge we’re facing in this space: coining a term is a tricky business. What the heck do we call what we’re doing? I tried vBooks (also lame), others have tried Diginovel, iStories, Vook, cross-platform – the list goes on, and I think they all fail to inspire at a level that will bring everyone under one tent. You guys did better with ARG – Alternate Reality Game – it stuck. How’d you do that?

To our credit (and by ‘our’ I mean everyone trying to explode books into the 21st century landscape) we’re talking about a brand new way of telling stories. We’re probably supposed to fumble around in the dark for awhile, but I think we’re getting closer. My two cents as of today is that we’re basically talking about something that’s been around for a long time, namely multimedia. And really, that’s a pretty good term to describe what’s happening to with these books; they’re becoming something broader, encompassing different medias. It’s interesting that movies and TV shows and web sites don’t have the same challenge. Creators of those mediums aren’t sitting around debating what they should call something when a movie has an ARG and spawns a TV show. It’s simply multimedia. The difference with a project like Skeleton Creek or TRACKERS is that I’m committed to a simple premise those other examples aren’t interested in: for me, the destination is always the book. That means the videos, the games, the web sites – they have a job to do, which is to get young readers turning pages. At PC Studio, where we make all these assets, a video is only as good as the pages it pushes a reader to turn.
Long winded already and I haven’t even exited question number one. The short answer is MULTIMEDIA. That’s what it’s called, that’s what it is.

Read the rest of the interview at – www.argn.com

I just received Finnish versions of the original Skeleton Creek videos. It’s cool to see Skeleton Creek branching out into other countries. It seems to me that thet videos will be just as scary, no matter what language they’re in.

Here’s 3 of the Finnish passwords for you to use and view the videos.

usherintalo

korppi

trijekylljamrhyde

www.sarahfincher.com

Back Lot Updates:

There’s some new things to see in the back lot. We have a gallery of a very cool set. It’s in an old power station here in Walla Walla. It’s super huge and super old. Also, there’s a good vLog by the cast. It’s from another set (a super secret half-pipe).

The USA Today and the New York Times both reported on a new study out today on kids and technology. A fascinating look at how quickly things are changing: www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2010-01-20-1Avideokids20_ST_N.htm

As kids and teens spend more and more time tied to tech, what will happen to these things we call books? There’s no doubt that some of them will morph into MMU’s (Media Mash-ups): Printed pages, videos, games, web elements, and mobile content combined to create (sometimes) great stories.

Here’s my guiding principle when I work on multimedia projects: when we put technology ahead of the story, the characters, and the turning of pages, the book itself becomes irrelevant. Mixing books with other modern media’s is perfectly fine, but young readers should hear us loud and clear: the destination is always the book.

For further exploration, check out this audio discussion about Skeleton Creek, the first book/video hybrid ever made: www.patrickcarman.com/media/patrick-carman-jeffrey-townsend-discuss-skeleton-creek-on-ktel/

This is an interview on ABC where I got to bring Jeffrey Townsend with me. The first half is all about 39 Clues (just me), then Jeffrey gets on with me in the second half and we talk about the making of Ghost in the Machine. For a more in depth duel interview with the two of us, check out the radio interview we did here (fourth link down in the trailers and news stories section on the right): www.patrickcarman.com/mediakit/skeletoncreek

The Haunted Back Lot